Best Of

I’m calling bollocks on Braverman.

Absurd not to call, for example, Lewis Hamilton, English.
I know I was arguing last week that there is an English ethnic identity which is worth preserving, but it seems to me that Englishness as a label can be comfortably broader than that.

And also, narrower: I was always happy to describe myself as British, but never English. I don’t feel English, and there I am not English.

In theory of course you can have debates around Englishness as an 'ethnic identity' in theory, but in practice you can end up in dark, racist places.

Like I have a friend with a Polish name from one grandparent, she's as 'English' as it's possible to be. Fairly posh and from Surrey. Doesn't do anything 'Polish' - it would be absurd to say she's not 'English'. Most people in the country have some kind of mixed heritage from somewhere that isn't 'English'. Look at the number of Scottish, Welsh, or Irish surnames. How do they count towards an English ethnicity?

So in practice you're basically judging whether someone's heritage from another country is visible - i.e. their skin colour is different and/or are culturally different. Which leads to judging people on that rather than where they grew up.

If you qualified to play for the England football team at birth then you can be English (you could of course renounce it in favour of another identity, like say, Ryan Giggs).

Yes, I'm half Russian by birth and grew up mostly in Vienna and Copenhagen, but I actually feel very English. Crude indicators tend not to work.

Born in Wales, but after 3 days there brought up in Yorkshire and feeling perfectly English. But don’t have European white skin, and one parents immediate ancestry is Hong Kong, which was British colony since deal that ended Opium Wars, and County of China before that for like ever. Other parents ancestry is farming in Lower Saxony for like ever. So rather than English I am British Asian German?

What motivates Swella to talk such shit?

Has Matt Goodwin decided to be the next leader of Reform and ultimately PM, or is he sticking to making a name and career out of rabble rousing populist simple answers to complex problems? Or both. It isn't neither.

https://www.mattgoodwin.org/p/i-want-my-country-back-my-latest?utm_campaign=email-half-post&r=1mnpci&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

Mrs C and I were talking about this this morning, during the interview with the chap who is Inquiring into the Water Companies.
We wondered what, if any advantage there had been to most of us from the Tories de-nationalisation programme.
A few people have, of course, got very rich, but what about the rest of us?
"Wanting our country back" to us would be the return of all the assets sold off. And as a small example, someone here mentioned that many ex-Council houses were now rented out.

This Tulsi Gabbard one is weird, from a regime that have just handed over much of the USA citizens' private data to an unlawfully appointed oligarch.

ISTM that making citizens' data never-accessible for criminal investigation (the Apple position), and getting into a strop about it, is strange. The US Head of National Intelligence security defending the privacy rights of child abusers and terrorists is not what I would expect.

Plus there's the old Usonian problem of assuming the US Govt has the right to direct the entire world as to what their laws should be, as if the US Govt defines the privacy rights entitlement of their citizens in other jurisdictions:

In a letter, Ms Gabbard said she was seeking further information from the FBI and other US agencies and said, if the reports were true, the UK government's actions amounted to an "egregious violation" of US citizens' privacy.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c1kjmddx2nzo

I'd say the debate needs to be around what level of approval is required before access can be ordered - whether "Home Office", "Chief Constable", "High Court Judge", or some other.

Backkground: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c5yvn90pl5no

The row with America was predicted on pb. Indignant talk of America dictating privacy entitlements around the world misses that is precisely what Britain is doing, or is seeking
to do.

Not at all.

Britain is saying that a court order grants access to information

Think about the mechanism by which Apple can access that information, and you will see the problem. If it is effectively encrypted then Apple cannot decrypt it, and therefore cannot comply. Britain is seeking to ban strong (ie effective) encryption.

And what is wrong with that?

Sidestepping whether it is good or bad, the
diplomatic problem is Britain is telling
American companies to weaken their
security (and in a way that would be hard to
confine to British customers).

If Apple wants to operate in the UK it has to obey UK law. What’s wrong with that?

Trump has just told us to go fuck ourselves with the new Online Safety Act, because it will impinge on US tech giants

Result? We are yielding

"UK willing to renegotiate online harm laws to avoid Trump tariffs

Starmer may be prepared to alter social media safety Act to accommodate US president and his ‘tech bros’ to secure favourable trade deal"


https://www.telegraph.co.uk/us/politics/2025/02/09/uk-willing-rework-online-harms-bill-avoid-trump-tariffs/

We are in a new era of power politics, that's "what's wrong with that"

Because whatever our starting point he’s going to ask for something.

We operate our country in the way that is right for our country.

We stand up to Russia. We stand up to China. We should stand up to Trump, no matter how uncomfortable it might be for a few years.

And, to be clear, if Apple wants to operate in the UK it must abide by UK law. It is up to us if we want to amend our laws under pressure from the US but Apple has to abide by the final result.

But that isn't true, is it? We are so economically, politically and militarily dependent on the USA - and now ALSO technologically subjugated - we have no option but to jump yay high when asked

eg Let's say Apple responded to a wild new UK lawby saying "We will withdraw all apple products from the UK and they shall cease to function in five weeks, unless you change this law", meaning all owners of iPhones, Apple watches, macs, etc, are fucked

Apple could afford to do this, quite easily, it is so big - it might be painful but Britain is not a huge market for them, it is not China or the EU. And it would be an impressive show of strength pour encourager les autres

Such would be the outcry from voters any UK government would fold and seek a humiliating compromise, or maybe we could ask the UN or the Hague or the government of Mauritius to step in and help us tell those Americans a thing or two?

Apple couldn't afford to do it as nobody anywhere in the world would buy an iPhone again. Apart from that a flawless argument

Lol that's delusional.

Thinking that Apple would make all its products in the UK cease to function in 5 weeks isn't delusional? Moron

Apple have already responded by switching off the highest levels of security which mean that all Apple products in the UK are now less safe and more prone to hacking and cyber attack than the same products anywhere else in the world.

How is that good for UK consumers? The UK Government has just made the online environment significantly less safe for UK citizens. Great job

I'd say the debate needs to be around what level of approval is required before access can be ordered - whether "Home Office", "Chief Constable", "High Court Judge", or some other.

Backkground: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c5yvn90pl5no

No the legal authority required is not the issue. The issue is that building a backdoor is a bad idea.

If you have one way into a cryptosystem and add a backdoor you now have two ways into a cryptosystem. It is inherently less secure. Anyone who argues it has equal security is bluntly put an idiot.

Secondly because these golden-key, key escrow, secondary key, or key-wrapping techniques — whatever term or approach is used doesn't matter — are intended to operate at a large scale not only have you added a second door, but you have created a master key in effect. By necessity they give one of few people access to everything, a master key level of access.

The US built such a system into their telecoms networks, CALEA, the Chinese Salt Typhoon* hackers have exploited it at scale across most US telecoms companies. The FBI has actually been warning Americans to avoid this threat by using end-to-end encryption. The very thing the UK government wants removed from iCloud at a global scale.

If the UK had some master key level access to iCloud it would be one of the top targets for Russian and Chinese intelligence services. Rightly Apple have decided not to cooperate with such a terrible idea.

* Salt Typhoon don't even break any cryptography they simply backdoor the servers that run the CALEA lawful intercept/backdoor. The very existence of the backdoor IS the vulnerability, not a flaw in the cryptography. If anyone in the UK government thinks that they will be immune to such attacks they are idiots.

This Tulsi Gabbard one is weird, from a regime that have just handed over much of the USA citizens' private data to an unlawfully appointed oligarch.

ISTM that making citizens' data never-accessible for criminal investigation (the Apple position), and getting into a strop about it, is strange. The US Head of National Intelligence security defending the privacy rights of child abusers and terrorists is not what I would expect.

Plus there's the old Usonian problem of assuming the US Govt has the right to direct the entire world as to what their laws should be, as if the US Govt defines the privacy rights entitlement of their citizens in other jurisdictions:

In a letter, Ms Gabbard said she was seeking further information from the FBI and other US agencies and said, if the reports were true, the UK government's actions amounted to an "egregious violation" of US citizens' privacy.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c1kjmddx2nzo

I'd say the debate needs to be around what level of approval is required before access can be ordered - whether "Home Office", "Chief Constable", "High Court Judge", or some other.

Backkground: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c5yvn90pl5no

The row with America was predicted on pb. Indignant talk of America dictating privacy entitlements around the world misses that is precisely what Britain is doing, or is seeking
to do.

Not at all.

Britain is saying that a court order grants access to information

Think about the mechanism by which Apple can access that information, and you will see the problem. If it is effectively encrypted then Apple cannot decrypt it, and therefore cannot comply. Britain is seeking to ban strong (ie effective) encryption.

And what is wrong with that?

1) Strong encryption is, essentially, un-bannable. I have a T-Shirt, back from when the US government was trying to declare all strong encryption a munition. It has a 4 line Perl script that implements unlimited key length RSA.

It’s been shortened to 3 lines, since

#!/bin/perl -s-- -export-a-crypto-system-sig -RSA-3-lines-PERL
$m=unpack(H.$w,$m."\0"x$w),$_=`echo "16do$w 2+4Oi0$d*-^1[d2%Sa
2/d0<X+d*La1=z\U$n%0]SX$k"[$m*]\EszlXx++p|dc`,s/^.|\W//g,print
pack('H*',$_)while read(STDIN,$m,($w=2*$d-1+length$n&~1)/2)

That’s the whole game, right there.

2) strong encryption protects our world. Not just your money, the ownership records of your property….. If you build in back doors, mathematically, this is a common vulnerability. That’s trying to make Die Hard 4 actually - imagine the fun if Russian hackers got into such a back door? And turned off all the infrastructure?

3) So what is going on? In past times, the police and security services tapped into unencrypted communications. Not exactly legal and it wasn’t used in court. That door is closing.

What has really changed is the incorporation of high quality encryption (written about in books etc since before computers) into everyday apps.

You are using it right now - https in your browser.